Lone Gull 10K Recap

Hers was maybe a little better… she came in 2nd place for the 19 and under age group. Sweet!

I wore my Team In Training bracelet, and while I noticed a couple others on the course, I didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone about it. Web rumors say TNT will start reviewing applications this week. Will this be my last training race before I hear if my application was successful? Pins and needles!

I ended up finishing a lot faster than I thought I would. In part, that was because of my running club at work. We had a great compliment show up, and there was more than once when I wanted to quit, but wouldn’t let one of my teammates in front of me run away. “Just… Keep… Up…” My goal going into the race was to finish in an hour. My official time (from when I actually crossed the start to when I crossed the finish) ended up being 54:58, or an 8:51 minutes per mile pace. That’s my 5K pace, and I finished the run more than five minutes faster than goal! Color me stoked…

For me, the first four and a half miles went by pretty easily. I had the RunKeeper app set to give m my pace every quarter mile, so I knew I was hitting to course much faster than I intended. Still, I was seeming to come in at ~6.7 MPH without a tremendous amount of effort, so I stuck with it. The hardest part for the first couple of miles was navigating through all the other runners.

Miles three and four were the easiest for me. I averaged 8:50 per mile during this time, and the crowd had stretched out by this point. I was passing more people than not, and not breathing too hard.

It was during the fifth mile that my aggressive pacing started to catch up to me, and started breathing pretty hard. This only got worse in mile six, but one of my teammates from work was right in front of me, and while we only exchanged a few words over those last two miles, I stuck to Mark as much as I could. Having him a few paces in front of me helped me finish strong. Then my playlist served up AC/DC’s Thunderstruck as we hit the last hill. You do NOT wimp out while Thunderstruck is playing. You run faster.

It was a great morning. I hope the half marathon next weekend goes as smoothly.